Instagram only marketing doesn’t work in a small town salon
I’m not sure what your Instagram algorithm looks like, but I feel like all anyone wants to talk about these days are ways to grow followers and gain clients through Instagram and TikTok. You might notice strategies like posting a certain number of times a day, or how to find trending audios, but the vast majority of this advice is centered around reaching as many people as possible instead of targeting the clients that are actually local to you.
If we are getting honest for a minute, I believe social media is a tool that all stylists, both small town and big city, can benefit from but the way it is commonly discussed online is not the way I find it most valuable.
In this episode I am going to be breaking down some common misconceptions about social media marketing as a small town stylist, and how you can use it to your advantage to attract more clients locally to you.
Starting with the often over-glamorized “vanity metrics” How many times have you looked at someone’s page and assumed that they must be fully booked because they have a large following and a perfectly aesthetic page? The reality is, your social media metrics are not always aligned with your business success.
I know for me personally I have had several viral reels and a decently larger following on Instagram that completely blows the engagement I get on Facebook out of the water. I’m talking like 200-1000% more likes and follows on IG than Facebook. However, the vast majority of my clients find me through my smaller platforms like Facebook and my Google business listing because the bulk of my Instagram following is centered around other hairstylists. As someone with a goal of connecting and engaging with other stylists through my education, these balances make sense for my unique business. However, if I were mainly focused on growing my business behind the chair, the larger Instagram following wouldn’t be doing me any real favors since it’s mostly stylists
Other stylists are rarely if ever going to become your client, and it’s only natural for stylists in smaller towns to have a smaller following because the population of potential clients is smaller as well. This doesn’t mean there is any less opportunity for success, but rather a shift in perspective on what metrics actually matter for your personal business.
If your only goals when posting on social media are to grow your following or have a viral reel, you might find yourself accidentally in front of the wrong audience. In my experience when a reel goes viral it starts off great and then almost immediately gets picked up by trolls who only want to either comment about something unrelated to the topic of your post, or they want to argue against whatever you’re saying. If you have a population of 6k or less, why would you make it a goal to have a reel hit 100k views or more when the reality is those viewers will most likely not convert into clients? Often times the reels or TikTok’s that do take off are not the ones relatable to our clients at all, but rather the ones that relate to other stylists and can often turn into client shaming posts real quick. Although it might be all for fun and games, it is doing nothing to advance connections with client and only alienating you from their experience in your chair. You can of course be relatable and funny without client shaming, but it’s something to be mindful of when you’re planning your content.
As a stylist who wants to achieve genuine business growth and client connections from social media, your intentions with each post need to be dedicated towards how you can serve that audience. What can they learn from your post? How will this post better educate them about the problems you solve for them? Those are the posts that will not only generate more clients, but the ones that will help build you as an authority regardless of your follower count because there is genuine value in what you’re posting.
The next thing I want to address is this “Instagram only” method of marketing. Many times this makes us fall into the same traps I mentioned before. There is so much focus on metrics that we start doing techniques to push our content out to as many people as possible, the issue with this? You don’t want your page in front of random scrollers, you want a targeted audience who will invest in your business. This requires us to optimize your SEO, also known as search engine optimization. SEO is how we get to take back control over our marketing instead of crossing our fingers and hoping the algorithm magically blesses us with views. It’s the key to getting your name in front of clients who are searching for exactly what you have to offer.
The best way I can help you get in the mindset of improving your SEO is to think about how people are searching for you. Are people googling hair stylists in your area? How can you boost your name to the top of those search results? A big component of this is utilizing key words in the most searchable areas of your page and your posts. Let’s start with the most obvious search tool, Google.
Google is often the first place we go when we need to search for a business. By creating a Google business listing you can automatically help boost your business to the top of those search results. And even if you’re a salon owner or work in a salon that has a verified Google business listing, I still recommend listing yourself as a stylist. Clients prefer to be loyal to a stylist, not a salon. Even in a commission salon setting, I believe it’s a stylists responsibility to market themselves because a business cannot build that personal connection with clients for you.
With your personal business listing I would recommend using your name plus what you do, for example I would put “Casey Taylor Hairstylist” or “Hair by Casey Taylor” for the most optimized results because hair and hairstylist are the words being searched in relation to the services I offer.
In your listing it’s also important to include your salon address and a link to your website so that they can follow up on booking an appointment, which leads me into my next recommendation: create a website!
I cannot tell you how many clients I have gotten from people stumbling upon my website (more proof: if you’re reading this right now it’s because you’ve found my website too!) A professional website with an easy to follow layout, and well executed branding will be able to showcase you and your services better than any social media platform ever could. This is the perfect place to house all of your services, pricing, and booking procedures.
I redirect all of my online presence back to my website because I know that almost every questions someone could have about my business is listed there. My address, salon hours, pricing, how to become a client, and other frequently asked questions.
I like to think of Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram as portfolios of my work and a way to build relationships, but my website is what truly bridges that connection to people becoming my client and establishing me as an expert. Believe it or not, if clients are searching for a new stylist and they are weighing their options, they will most likely choose the stylist with the more professional website.
With that being said, I would almost argue that a website is more important than social media, but that doesn’t mean you should skip social media all together. There are some key elements to your social media presence that are often overlooked, so instead of thinking about how frequently you should post or what hashtags to use, let’s clean up your bio and branding.
Starting with your handle/business name. Your IG handle, Facebook business page, and website domain should all match. This is going to make you much more searchable. For example my business is “Casey Taylor Stylist” so my IG handle is @caseytaylorstylist, and my Facebook business page is the same, and my website url is caseytaylorstylist.com
As an independent stylist I highly recommend having your first name or the name you go by in your handle, I find that this humanizes you more and people are much more likely to remember you.
Then when it comes to your Instagram name, so the title that appears on your page in your bio, I also recommend having your name plus where your located. On my page I would use something like Casey Taylor East Texas Hairstylist. This is because your IG name is searchable. If someone happens to use Instagram to search waste’s hairstylist there is a greater chance that my name and content will be boosted to the top of search results.
This same concept applies when writing captions for your posts on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok. If you can organically mention key words like where you’re located and what you specialize in within the text of your post, someone searching got those specific words is more likely to be shown your page.
Once they make it to your page, if they can see your business address, a link to your website, and a well showcased portfolio of your work, your marketing can almost work on autopilot from that point because you’ve set everything up ahead of time to make it as easy as possible for that potential client. I find that when it comes to marketing any business, the more established you appear by having these little details sorted out, the more clients you can attract locally.
My final piece of advice for attracting local clientele as a small town stylist, is to get involved in your community. This could be two things: physically getting involved by attending events, festivals, and joining your local chamber of commerce, or it could be getting involved online.
Almost every small town has a local Facebook group (or many) Those groups can sometimes be a cesspool of drama, bargain hunters, and a never ending cycle of “what is being built at XYZ location?” But they are also a place where potential clients are asking for advice on who to go to for hair services.
You might be worried that the majority of these posters are people who are looking to spend $50 for a color correction from box black to platinum blonde, tomorrow. And in some ways you would be correct. However, by having the well laid out social media and website we talked about previously, and a streamlined new client onboarding process, you will be able to filter out those unwanted clients while still being visible to the local clients who are scrolling these pages and lurking in the comment section to see who is recommended. I built the bulk of my initial clientele in these local Facebook groups, and I will personally vouch that I have some of the best clients a stylist could have in my chair.
I could spend forever talking more in depth about strategies for posting on social media, how to interact in these Facebook groups, branding tips to improve your website, and more. Maybe that’s a topic we can dive into in a later episode, but for today I want to close out by reminding you that just because you see a big hairfluencer account marketing a certain way or social media gurus preaching about followers, doesn’t mean those strategies have to be applied to your personal business. Find the systems that work for your personal demographic and ignore the extra noise, especially if it’s creating unnecessary stress in your business. Your peace is a priority worthy of protection and your business doesn’t have to be followed by the masses to be successful and lucrative.
- Casey Taylor
